


Patch

by dawittiest



Category: Marvel 616
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Civil War: The Confession (Marvel), Extremis, M/M, Post-Civil War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-14 20:47:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13598070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawittiest/pseuds/dawittiest
Summary: The anatomy of being human: an alternate confession.





	Patch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ironlawyer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ironlawyer/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Hour of Lead](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13461948) by [Ironlawyer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ironlawyer/pseuds/Ironlawyer). 



> I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from _The Confession_ , lifted a couple sentences from it too.
> 
> Written for 2018 Cap/IM remix relay challenge. Here’s the [masterlist](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Cap_Ironman_Relay_Remix_2018/profile). 
> 
> Thanks to wynnesome for beta!

Still fist-like heart, sunken muscles drained of mass and power, flesh holes that spat out five pints of blood – what is left of the man Tony loved. A lug of body defined by absences.

Tony used to be overabundance. Thoughts like maggots swarming out of his mouth. Too many faces turned at him, always at him, strangers’ hands tearing scraps of him to themselves: a camera smile, a drop-in-the-bucket wad of cash, a fuck. And abundance of humanity – leaking out of him with bile and snot and tears, something he never could cry or retch out, like there was a gland in his body tirelessly churning out new blobs of humanity for him to excrete.

He got better.

He’s done this before – buried his love, that is. Held Rumiko as her still-warm blood and life spilled through his fingers. Faced down cold, unrelenting stone – here lies my would-be home, my heart, the purpose of the world – with dead, dead certainty that if only he’d swallowed back the humanity pooling in his mouth, this wouldn’t be happening. He had the thing he couldn’t live with happen.

It felt like this: his bones rotting from the marrow, the useless bone-shells growing hard and too heavy, so heavy that it felt they would cut through his flesh like butter, scatter to the ground with a big clatter. Tony Stark, an empty bag of skin and a pile of bones. It felt like craving, _needing_ a drink. He doesn’t have to strain his memory – all he has to do is pull up a folder labelled _low place_ and the feelings are there, poor res because it’s before Extremis but readable.

He wonders how it would’ve felt, then, if instead of Rumiko’s such small, precious body he’d held Steve’s familiar bulk, bleeding out of gunshot wounds like he bled out today. What he would’ve said, standing over his tagged corpse. Would it have felt like Rumiko, or would it have been something uglier.

Now, looking down at the body that used to be Steve, he thinks of the question Steve asked him, the last question Steve asked him before he died; he thinks of _why_. Years and years ago, before the update, before everything, Tony got to fight by the side of his hero, a privilege he could only strive to be worthy of, for a second time. Maybe because that first time was on his mind, Tony looked at the armies of the living and the dead clashing below and saw the Avengers. Saw the heroes. He knew then. Seeing the first draft of SHRA, Tony didn’t rage, didn’t hurt. He only thought, _so this is it_. The future fell into place, like puzzle he was handed the final piece to. Then Extremis happened, an unexpected gift, and all weakness, every counter-productive human factor, fatigue, mood, doubt, was wiped away. He knew what he had to do. He thinks he would’ve told it all to Steve’s body, once. A deathbed confession, all backwards, too late.

He feels…

All dead bodies look the same. Strangled, drowned, _shot_ – all of them have that strange, in-human quality. Like the moment the heart stops pumping blood and the brain synapses fizzle out, the body that was a person stops being human and is just a slab of meat. Even burn victims, with their peeling bark skin, not even in a general shape of a human, share that same unreal-ness all dead things do. He supposes this is just like when something that was an animal becomes a roadkill; smeared across black asphalt, it doesn’t even look like it ever was living. It just looks like trash.

He traces the hollows of Steve’s body’s eyes, paw-hands, the Y stiches on the wide chest; they asked if he wanted to see Steve’s body in Captain America uniform. If he can stand to see the body as it is, dead, is what they meant. Once, Tony would’ve said yes, would’ve let them drape the corpse in red, white and blue costume splattered with blood at the torn edges, would’ve looked at the body and seen Steve. Wouldn’t have let them perform the autopsy without seeing the body first, most likely. Now, he knows it wouldn’t have changed anything regardless – the body’s eyes, the hands, the chest, they all look human on their own, but they won’t come together, the spaces between them stretching until it looks like a child’s grotesque scribble of a person. Modern Prometheus man made from dead body pieces.

Is it the brain? he wonders. Is it the heart? Is it the chest that doesn’t rise and fall with the lungs contracting, stiff and clunky? What is it this body lacks to be human? Maybe it’s just the simple knowledge it is dead. Maybe what makes it an empty meatbag is knowing that it is an empty meatbag.

Or maybe it’s the ability to feel. He curls his gauntlet into a fist, warms up the repulsor node. Neurons flare, an alert to the command center: the outer layer of the skin is burning. He turns off the repulsor, heals the burnt cells, all in under a millisecond. He has pain down to its basic components; he can pull up every memory when this body experienced pain, play it back like it’s happening in real time. He’s never been more in touch with his body’s every sensation, every emotion.

Is this feeling?

 _You have new powers you don’t understand_. Steve was almost right. He just didn’t know he was talking to a somebody that no longer existed. Old version of the system rewritten by the update.

This time, he swallowed back his humanity and the thing he couldn’t live with still happened. But Tony lived with it, then. He’ll live with it now, too.

_Was it worth it?_

Worth is countable. It’s a sum of minuses and pluses, a simple equation: if it comes up to a positive, it means you gained. He weights projected civilian fatalities, his tears and grief too big for his chest against friends gone and Steve, and this calm resolve. Which one comes on top? He won the war. He thinks of King Pyrrhus; he can imagine himself, in a different life, sobbing: there’s winning and there’s _winning_. Maybe to be human is to fail. This would’ve felt like a failing, once.

He supposes he fixed the humanity bug, after all.


End file.
